iPlayer downloads for Mac and Linux
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
The BBC iPlayer was recently upgraded to allow Mac and Linux machines to download files for later playback. Previously you could only stream directly from the server, which I often found would stall in the middle of a programme, making it unusable.
To access the download functionality, you need to sign up for access to the iPlayer "labs", but it's very simple and instantaneous to do this. The iPlayer Desktop app is built with Adobe AIR, and integrates reasonably well with browsing the iPlayer site in a web browser.
The advantages of this approach over downloading files with iPlayer Downloader (discussed here) are that you get a fairly nice GUI for managing the files, and (more importantly) higher quality video. The files I've seen are 640x360, whereas the iPhone versions acquired by the iPlayer Downloader are 480x272.
However... (and it's a big however) they are also infected with DRM encoding to limit playback to a certain time period. This also prevents them being played with any video player other than the iPlayer Desktop. I can't see any obvious way of removing this. ffmpeg is able to report on the file statistics, but not able to convert it. Media Info Mac (which I've just discovered) is also able to read the stats. And none of VLC, MPEGStreamClip or Quicktime are able to play it.
So while it's nice of the BBC to think of us Mac users, it still fails my basic requirement of watching TV on a TV, not a computer (is this really such a strange request???). So I'm sticking to iPlayer Downloader for now. Needless to say, any suggestions on how to remove the DRM, very gratefully received.
